Optimizing for Vertical Search

VERTICAL SEARCH ENGINES FOCUS ON SPECIFIC NICHES OF WEB CONTENT, including images, videos, news, travel, and people. Such engines exist to provide value to their user base in ways that go beyond what traditional web search engines provide.

One area where vertical search engines can excel in comparison to their more general web search counterparts is in providing more relevant results in their specific category. They may accomplish this by any number of means, including making assumptions about user intent based on their vertical nature (an option that full web search engines do not normally have), specialized crawls, more human review, and the ability to leverage specialized databases of information (potentially including databases not available online).

There is a lot of opportunity in vertical search. SEO professionals need to seriously consider what potential benefits vertical search areas can provide to their websites. Of course, there are significant differences in how you optimize for vertical search engines, and that is part of what we will explore in this chapter.

The Opportunities in Vertical Search

Vertical search has been around for almost as long as the major search engines have been in existence. Some of the first vertical search engines were for image search, news group search, and news search, but many other vertical search properties have emerged since then, both from the major search engines and from third parties.

This article will focus on strategies for optimizing your website for the vertical search offerings from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. We will also spend some time on YouTube, which in January 2009 became the second largest search engine on the Web. First we will look at the data for how vertical search volume compares to regular web search. The data in Table 8-1 comes from Hitwise, and shows the top 20 Google domains as of May 2006, which is one year before the advent of Universal Search.

In May 2006, image search comprised almost 10% of Google search volume. Pair this with the knowledge that a smaller number of people on the Web optimize their sites properly for image search (or other vertical search engines) and you can see how paying attention to vertical search can pay tremendous dividends.

Of course, just getting the traffic is not enough. You also need to be able to use that traffic. If someone is coming to your site just to steal your image, for example, this traffic is likely not of value to you. So, although a lot of traffic may be available, you should not ignore the importance of determining how to engage users with your site. For instance, you could serve up some custom content for visitors from an image search engine to highlight other areas on your site that might be of interest, or embed logos/references into your images so that they carry branding value as they get “stolen” and republished on and off the Web.